Sermon

The Free Mind

The Rev. Jack D. Bryant

Hope Unitarian Church

August 22, 2004

First Reading: Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Second Reading: -Hub (Robert Duval) speaking to Walter (Haley Joe Osment) in Secondhand Lions about “What Every Boy Needs to Know About Being a Man”

“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, virtue, and courage mean everything; that money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. That true love never dies. Doesn’t matter if they’re true or not. A man should believe in those things anyway. Because they are the things worth believing in.”

Third Reading: Josiah Bartlett , February 22, 1942

"In times of doubt, this church stands for faith; in moments of despair, for hope; amid confusion and hot feelings, for straight thinking and higher loyalties; and when the worth of persons is forgotten, here they are everything. You need the fellowship of this church in these times."

"We have failed to attain peace because we have not worked for justice, but only for the absence of conflict. The absence of conflict may be only the quiescence of despair, like the "peace" of conquered France today. If there is no justice, then the absence of conflict but postpones the day of violence and makes it more dreadful."

"Let us not despair of our ideals or say that we must unlearn all that the last war taught us: the lesson that war is not glorious and that we either find a way to end it or die. We have missed the road, but that does not mean there is no road: only that there are no short-cuts. Peace is the fruit of righteousness, and righteousness never did come cheap, or without repentance and sacrifice."

Sermon

Last week I had a doctor’s appointment. It was a follow-up to an eye procedure I had a few days earlier. I expected to be there for just over an hour - two or three minutes for the doctor to look at my eye and confirm it was still there, and an hour of waiting. I suspect most of you know that feeling. I signed in with the receptionist, picked up a magazine and sat down to wait. The magazine I found wasn’t what I had hoped for, so I looked around for something else to pass the time. Doing so I couldn’t help but notice the television sets hanging from the ceiling, tuned to a variety of channels. I think there were five of them. For a moment I thought about watching one of the shows to pass the time, but quickly realized there wasn’t anything that looked interesting. It was then that I realized that most of the other faces in the room were turned upwards watching the screens. As I did so it occurred to me that the TVs were an acknowledgment that people were expected to wait a long time. And as that thought crossed my mind I realized what the televisions sets were for. Literally they were electronic devices, technological marvels of the modern world. But functionally they were tranquilizers. They were there to sedate people while they waited. You wouldn’t want people thinking about how long they were waiting for a two or three minute check-up. If they actually thought about it they might organize a patient’s union on the spot and start demonstrating. Give ‘em a little electronic Prozac and they’ll be comfortable.

Now I’m not complaining about doctors this morning. I want you to know I was in and out of there in thirty minutes and the exam took longer than I thought - about fifteen or twenty minutes by the time I saw two different technicians and the doctor. All in all I was pleased with how quickly it went. But television as Prozac started me thinking about freedom. It started me thinking about how much of what I call my free time I spend watching television or engaging in other activities not to achieve something, but just to pass the time, just to sedate myself to deal with the boredom of doing nothing. I thought of all the time I’ve spent on airplanes, desperately trying to pass the excruciatingly painful time seated in those narrow seats going from point A to point B, wishing for some form of tranquilizer to make me oblivious to the experience.

All this was on my mind when I received a phone call last week from someone’s political campaign. It doesn’t matter who it was. A young woman begin telling me about her candidate. It was a prepared statement reciting a standard political litany. I won’t repeat what she said, but trust me: you’ve heard it. Most - not all, but most - of the candidates have such litanies. There was no passion in what the young woman said, just a monotone recitation with a kind of flat, computer like quality. Actually, most of the computer voices I hear have more emotional contact. She told me nothing about the candidate as a human being. She told me nothing about what he believed. She just recited the candidate’s political creed. Then she said, in the same mechanical, uninspiring tone of voice, “Can he count on your vote?”

I replied, “I don’t think so.”

I hung up the telephone thinking that the statement she’d read wasn’t supposed to make me think about the candidate, it wasn’t supposed to make me think about what he stood for, nor to cause me to reflect on his character. I was supposed to be lulled to sleep, to stop thinking, to drop into a kind of robotic state, and say, in response to the political creed she had read, “Yes, I will vote for him.”

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to bash politicians this morning. What concerned me was the invitation not to think, the invitation to be seduced by a kind of political Prozac, to go to sleep and not to actively engage with the serious political questions our country confronts today.

The same experience has happened to me more times than I can remember in religious settings. I’ve heard countless religious messages that tell me to stop thinking, don’t worry and be happy. The philosopher Karl Marx was famous for saying, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Too often that is true. Religion is used to sedate people. Prior to the Civil War religion was used to justify slavery. “Be obedient to your masters.” That was the message of religion to the slaves of the American south. The slave owners wanted weekly religious services for their slaves. I have always found it ironic that the religion of the slaves owners became the religion of slaves and their descendents.

But that doesn’t mean that television, politics or religion is always a way of sedating people. At its best television becomes a window on the world, a call to action, the mechanism that brought the Civil Rights movement into every home in the land. Politics became John F. Kennedy telling Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And religion was the rallying cry of those who brought an end to slavery in America; and in the nineteen fifties and sixties led the cause of civil rights. Each time I think of those religious voices that use religion as the opiate of the masses I am reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr. who defied institutional racism; of Karl Barth, the theologian who drafted and published - in Germany - the Barmen Declaration demanding that German Christians reject Hitler as a matter of religious principle - Barth got out of Germany just in time to save his own life; and of countless other religious voices that have challenged humanity in every age to throw off the bonds of servitude, to claim the divine freedom as a human birthright, and to work for the world that ought to be.

But in this world there will continue to be two kinds of voices: those that call for us to settle for the way things are, to settle for the easy way, to just go to sleep and not make waves; and there will be those who are trouble makers, who challenge the status quo, who call for us to wake up, who demand that the only acceptable course of action is to work for what ought to be. The former is a corruption of everything holy. The later is what religion actually is.

Two thousand years ago a man named Jesus was one of those trouble makers. Hanging around with his twelve friends he preached a doctrine that opposed the status quo. He preached a doctrine that said people shouldn’t accept the world the way it was, but should work to make the world the way it ought to be. Like many who preach such messages his life was short. But the message about Jesus that is meaningful for today is not his death, but how he lived his life, a life lived not for what was, but a life lived for what ought to be. I don’t know of a more important message for Unitarians today. And I say that because I believe it is at the very heart of what it means to be a Unitarian.

Our church is in the process of defining our core values. Those foundational values are reason, tolerance, and integrity. They support truth and love that we have fashioned into a vision, a guiding star for our congregation: Seeking truth, Sharing love: within, among and beyond. But our movement, our larger movement, the centuries long tradition of Unitarianism, has its own core values: freedom, reason and tolerance. None is more important than freedom.

Quite often I’ve made the distinction between freedom and the ability to do or believe whatever you want. That’s why it’s not true that being a Unitarian means you can believe whatever you want or do whatever you want. It’s not true. That misconception of freedom is an adolescent fantasy. What’s true is that as a Unitarian you are free to believe what you must believe, what your conscience requires of you; and you are free to act as your conscience requires - act with integrity - acting consistent with your most deeply held values. But there’s another kind of phony freedom. Its freedom from worry, freedom from concern, freedom from boredom, freedom from anything that might makes us uncomfortable or feel out of sorts. It’s the phony freedom that comes with television that sedates us, political messages that call for unquestioning responses and religious messages that are the opiate of the masses.

Genuine freedom, the genuine freedom that our religious tradition celebrates is not found in retreat from the world. It isn’t found in turning our church into a hiding place from the world, just as Thoreau did not find freedom by retreating to Walden Pond. Thoreau went to the woods for good reason. He went to delve deep into himself and the world and to understand that relationship. He did not, I think, go just to delve into himself. He went to explore the relationships that a century and-a-half later the theologian Henry Nelson Wieman declared the places where God is found. I think that is why we go to church, why we should all go to church. The church, at its best, is our own personal Walden, the place where we can be safe to strip away the complexities of our lives, to find the solitude that leads to community, the poverty that transforms itself into riches, and the weakness that becomes strength. And then, for reasons as good as those that brought us here, to venture out again into the world, that like Thoreau we might not make our lives a cabin passage spent comfortably sedated and oblivious to the world, but rather a voyage before the mast, a life spent building foundations under the castles of our minds, a life spent working to make the world not what it is, but what it ought to be.

That’s the same message I heard in the recent movie, “Secondhand Lions.” I’m sure many of you saw it. It’s the story of a young boy named Walter left to spend the summer with his two mysterious uncles. Walter is horrified by the situation, especially when he discovers they don’t have a television set. There is no electronic Prozac in their house. But over time he begins to realize that they have something to teach him that is far more important than the distractions of entertainment:

“Sometimes,” his uncle Hub tells him, “the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, virtue, and courage mean everything; that money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. That true love never dies. Doesn’t matter if they’re true or not. A man should believe in those things anyway. Because they are the things worth believing in.”

But these are not just empty words, not just vacuous slogans intended to lull Walter to sleep, not a secular opiate for a young boy. You see in the movie that Hub is a realist. He knows that people can be evil. He is a man who does not hesitate to confront evil, to stand-up for the right. And he also believes that people can change, that people can be given a second chance. But none of it happens unless you are willing to work to see that good triumphs over evil, none of it happens unless you are willing to put your life on the line and to fight for the triumph of righteousness.

The same message is found in our last reading this morning. That reading was by Josiah Bartlett, the Rev. Josiah Bartlett, a Unitarian minister I had the privilege of knowing while in Austin, Texas. He was speaking about the entrance of the United States into World War Two. But I think his words have a universal application - especially to the idea of freedom. “We have missed the road,” he said, “but that does not mean there is no road: only that there are no short-cuts. Peace is the fruit of righteousness, and righteousness never did come cheap, or without repentance and sacrifice.”

Too often we miss the road of freedom. Too often we abandon the gift of grace that is the divine freedom. We strive for short-cuts. We try to make freedom into freedom from. We try to make freedom into an adolescent fantasy. We try to make freedom into something easy, into that which will give us the easy life. But that only makes freedom into something tawdry and cheap. Genuine freedom, the real article, is never cheap and never easy. It is never freedom from anything. It is always to be found in the choice to leave the sacred grove of woods - be it Walden Pond or Hope Hill - and to work to put foundations under the castles we have built in the air, to transform what ought to be into what is; it is always to be found in the choice to believe in the things that men and women ought to believe in, that they need to believe in, not because they are true, but because they are the things that ought to be true; and it is always to be found in the decision to take to the road where there are no short-cuts with the certain knowledge that neither righteousness nor freedom ever comes cheap - they come only with hard work and sacrifice.

If you thought that Unitarianism was an easy religion you are wrong. Real religion - by whatever name it goes - is never the easy way, it is always the difficult path. That doesn’t mean that real religion condemns you to a life of servitude. I don’t believe that. But I do believe that to have real religion, to finally grasp genuine freedom, the divine freedom that lies at the heart of our religious tradition, to have what we so blithely call a free mind, that one must voluntarily commit oneself to a life of hard labor, a life of putting one’s life on the line so that good will triumph over evil, a life lived not in a childlike belief that everything is wonderful, but a life lived committed to transforming what ought to be true into reality, in living a life that embraces every good struggle and accepts repentance and sacrifice as the path of righteousness. The way of freedom is narrow and hard. But this church calls for us to walk that path together that we might support one another as we struggle to be free and to grow into harmony with the divine.

For the free church, for free religion and for the free mind, Amen.